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From Thursday to Saturday, April 17th to the 19th, we competed in the Archimedes division of the FIRST Championship Event. After all the dust settled, we emerged with a 5-2-0 record, landing us in the 18th rank of the 85 teams competing in our division. The Championship is a huge event, with FIRST Lego League, FIRST Tech Challenge, and FIRST Robotics Competition all competeing in one place. You can see some of the pictures below.
If you missed watching our matches, you can catch them all on The Blue Alliance.
It's short and sweet. Enjoy!
We've released a demo page of our Rex Scouting System so you can check out the various functions. This is the public interface that you would see if you logged onto our system at an event. The data in the system is from the Philadelphia Regional. Countdown timers do not work correctly because the system uses dates for all matches. You can check out the various strength prediction and ranking information. Just head over to:
Any feedback on our forum would be greatly appreciated!
Saturday the 5th of April, members from Rex represented the club in the Johns Hopkins Unversity Robotics System Challenge. The challenge is seperated into four activities that use a small programmable robot called the Boebot. Congratulations to the following Rex members for their accomplishments!
| Innovative Use of the Boebot - 1st place | Steven Gienow, Deo Dunham and Prashil Patel |
| Surgical Challenge - 1st place | Liang Tang, Owen Chen, and Cheng Zhou |
| Surgical Challenge - 3rd place | Andrew Lane and Max Spector |
| Mystery Course - 3rd place | Patrick Smith and Katie Vita |
| Petite Slalom - 2nd place | Katherin Chen and Matt Verne |
A special thank you to Mark Sherron of Harrisburg Robotics for setting up the interview! You can watch the full twelve minute segment below.
The Dulaney High School Robotics Club Team Rex has blazed through the regionals of the 2008 FIRST Robotics Competition FIRST Overdrive with distinction, and is bound for the national championship in Atlanta on April 17-19. We were proud to present a ceremonially oversized check from our community service budget to Team Rex at the Chesapeake Regional hosted at the nearby US Naval Academy, from March 13th to 15th.
Dean Kamen, co-founder of FIRST and prolific engineering inventor, made a personal appearance at the event and was treated like a rock star by the spirited crowd of aspiring engineers. In Annapolis, the team earned the Johnson & Johnson Gracious Professionalism Award celebrating their outstanding sportsmanship and gracious professionalism in the heat of competition, both on and off the playing field. By the end of the competition, enough challenges were resolved with the robot to place 45 out of 60 teams in the seeding rounds.
The Philadelphia regional hosted by Drexel University from March 27th to 29th, featured an improved Team Rex robot, finishing 22 out of 44 teams in the seeding rounds. The robot’s strengths warranted selection by a finalist alliance captain, where they fell in the quarterfinals to the eventual champion alliance.
In Philly, they earned the regional award for Best Website for their awesome student-designed, built, and managed www.dulaneyrobotics.com website. A Team Rex technical innovation in action at that regional was an electronic scouting system, a PHP and MySQL based system that uses laptops or any Wi-Fi enabled device to enter and retrieve data – a vast improvement over paper based systems.
From March 27th to the 29th, we competed at the Philadelphia Regional. This time around our robot performed much better, and we managed to place 22nd out of the 44 teams competing. We were chosen in the finals by alliance captain Team 357 - Royal Assault along with Team 709 - Femme Tech Fatale. Although we were eliminated in the quarter finals, the matches were quite fun and intense. We walked home with three safety awards from other teams, and the prize for Team 1885's First FIRST Trivia Challenge. Overall, Philadelphia was a great event, and we would like to thank everyone involved in setting it up, Drexel University, and of course Team 357 for choosing us, and Team 709 for being a great alliance partner!
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We would like to thank the NASA Goddard facility for the fantastic tour of their facilities on March 25th! We got to see real satellites in construction and some of the rigorous tests engineers at Goddard must put their designs through. We got to speak with one of the guys behind the upcoming Hubble service mission, and learned about the many sensors and imaging specifics of the telescope. Thank you once again to NASA Goddard for hosting this!
Thank you to everyone involved in the Chesapeake Regional for putting on an amazing event! The competition ran like clockwork. Unfortunately, our robot didn't. During the course of the competition, we ran into a wide range of problems. Near the end of the regional, we largely ironed out the issues with the robot. We did not place well however, coming in 45th of the 60 teams competing, but the lessons we learned and experiences we had put us in a good position for the upcoming Philadelphia competition.
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At previous competitions we relied on a paper based scouting system to track teams. This quickly escalated into a large binder full of papers that became difficult to search through and find useful data. For the 2008 competition season, we wanted a better way to scout. We developed a PHP and MySQL based system that uses laptops or any Wi-Fi enabled device to enter and retrieve data. This has allowed us to enter huge amounts of data and parse through it quickly, and has other benefits as well. You can check out the Rex Scouting System page for more details.
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Once the box appears, click and drag inside to move the image around.
We would like to extend our sincerest thank you to Raytheon for providing an excellent tour of their facilities to our team! As part of a growing partnership, mentors from Raytheon setup a tour of their Towson, Maryland facility where they develop combat identification products that aid military air traffic control and prevent friendly fire losses. It was interesting to see some of the same engineering principles we use in FIRST in a real world engineering challenge.
For the past six weeks, we have been hard at work designing, building, and testing our robot for the 2008 FIRST Competition, Overdrive. (See the game section for details) The conceptual idea of the robot is rather simple.
The robot utilizes double wide 80/20 members that are 4.5' tall and allow the bottom of the claw to tower at 7 feet maximum. The 80/20 and claw is driven via chain and wire rope, respectively. The claw uses fiberglass joined by aluminum blocks. This makes the claw flexible preventing damage during competition, yet the fiberglass is stiff enough to maintain rigidity when picking up the ball. The Claw features a 700mm infrared sensor used to pick up the ball automatically, eliminating human error.
The drive system is simple, yet effective. It utilizes two 8" IFI traction wheels mated to Banebot 12:1 planetary gearboxes with CIM motors in the front and two freewheeling Andy Mark 8" omni-wheels in the rear. The electronics portion of the robot is a two-tiered design that allows for easy access to key components.
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We are FIRST Robotics Team 1727, located at Dulaney High School in Timonium, Maryland. To find out more about us go to our team page. In only two years, we have come a long way, by winning six awards and going to the Atlanta Championship twice. Of all our awards, our greatest honor has been receiving the Chesapeake Regional Chairman's award. You can find out more about the Chairman's, and all the other awards we have won on our awards page. With entering our third year of competition in 2008 we are aiming for technical excellence.
Many factors went into winning the award for us, including our fundraising efforts, outreach, Vex Camp and LEGO Mindstorms Days, and the FIRST Baltimore Area Alliance. The Baltimore Alliance unites teams across the Baltimore area under a common name, with a common goal. We work together in colloborative fundraising efforts, and we support each other through the sharing of knowledge.
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For information about becoming a sponsor please email us at everybody@dulaneyrobotics.com
